Tag: games

In the Dark

In the Dark is a podcast that examines the 1989 abduction and murder of Jacob Wetterling from a small town in Minnesota with a keen focus on mistakes made by local police and an excellent discussion about how the case impacted law enforcement and policing in the United States. I absolutely loved it and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys true crime podcasts — particularly miniseries that do an in-depth analysis of one case.

Jacob Wetterling’s abduction is a famous case that has had a significant impact on law enforcement in the U.S. The first U.S. law to institute state sex-offender registries, enacted in 1994, was the Jacob Wetterling Act. The effects of the Jacob Wetterling Act and its significant updates and amendments are covered in detail in In the Dark. This was a highlight for me, as I’ve been interested in U.S. sex-offender registries since reading a phenomenal article in the New Yorker about sex crimes committed by minors. With just my basic knowledge, I believe that these laws have been used by politicians as an easy way to appear tough on crime without considering the consequences for many subsets of offenders whose crimes don’t really match up with the punishments.

In the Dark is also critical of the Jacob Wetterling investigation itself, positing that local and federal law enforcement officers missed a lot basic, local information due to their widening the search parameters for Jacob so quickly. American Public Media has done a fantastic job of showing that many typical investigation techniques weren’t followed in the Wetterling case, such as interviewing all of the victim’s neighbors and the individuals that resided on the road where Jacob was abducted. This is used to frame a wider discussion about the varying quality of law enforcement in the United States, which is far more decentralized than I had previously understood.

I didn’t have a great understanding of the structure of law enforcement in the U.S. prior to listening to In the Dark and I feel like I was able to learn a great deal that will be useful to me in the future when checking out other true crime media. Highly recommended.

Civilization VI

I like to play Civilization VI on a regular basis and, unfortunately, it drives my boyfriend a little crazy. Being a huge fan of deep and complex strategy games, he finds the Civilization series (colloquially called Civ) to be a little unsatisfying and often poorly designed, especially when it comes to the combat. Given my current physical limitations, however, games with simple control schemes that are slow and can be accessed mainly via mousing through menus are the perfect thing for me to play right now.

Civ VI is a weird game. In some ways it’s a significant improvement from its predecessor, Civilization V, and then it’s also a huge step backward. The way that builder units work in Civ VI, for example, is amazing and provides players with a lot more options to customize the way their cities and civilizations run. The civilizations themselves, however, are all a little dull. In Civ V, there were a lot of civilizations that had interesting quirks, such as the Venetian Empire, where you could establish only one city or China, which was always great for achieving the science win state. The civilizations available in the base version of Civ VI feel like they don’t really have any specialties. They might have a few minor bonuses here and there, but mostly they’re a little generic. I can see why Firaxis made these changes — the civilizations are much better balanced in VI, but removing some of those interesting quirks just makes the game a bit less interesting for me.

The most disappointing aspect of VI, however is what hasn’t changed since V: the payoff for winning a game is still terrible. When someone achieves a condition for victory, the game suddenly stops, a short cutscene plays and the game abruptly comes to an end. It feels a bit ridiculous and unsatisfying after you’ve spent upwards of 12 hours building your civilization and battling against your friends or the AI civilizations for everything to just end without any real ceremony.

My boyfriend and I play VI instead of V mainly due to the changes in how units can move around the board and the builder unit changes — it can be difficult to go back to V if you like those upgrades. I would not, however, recommend that anyone purchase Civilization VI as it is right now. Civ V is a great value. If you can catch it on a Steam sale, you can often buy it for less than $20 and it comes with all of the content added to the game after its release. VI right now is pricey and new civilizations have to be purchased in DLC packs that, in my opinion, aren’t worth their significant cost.

In 2013, my New Years Resolution was to stop mindlessly watching TV after work. At that time, I was living and working in Red Deer, Alberta and I had cable. I didn’t have a huge package with loads of channels, but I did have the two most important channels (for me): HGTV and the Food Network. Due to the shortage of jobs in my field (and also to my own stupidity) I had been unemployed for some time before moving to Alberta. I was unaccustomed to working full time and, for the first few months that I lived away, it was a tough transition. I found myself spending far too many evenings lounging on my couch, mindlessly watching House Hunters and Chopped.

These shows are fine and I still love watching HGTV and the Food Network, but I was getting bored. I was spending hours watching TV shows that I wasn’t engaged in and didn’t really care about. I wasn’t excited about watching them or experiencing any joy or happiness, I was just tired after work and wanted to be halfway amused without making any real effort. This was, in my opinion, an enormous waste of time.

If you can manage it (and I definitely could at that point), time away from work should be spent doing things that make you happy. Things to which you are devoting 100% of your attention and that are bringing you a great deal of joy. It could be watching TV series or reading or knitting or playing video games or sports. It could be spending time with your family or friends or your partner. In my opinion, no free time is wasted as long as you’re wholeheartedly enjoying yourself.

I’ve been wasting too much of my free time lately, mostly on YouTube.

We have cable in our home, but I don’t use it. Since I went back to work in 2016, I have replaced HGTV and the Food Network with YouTube. If I can’t decide what I want to do or I’ve had a tough day at the office and I can’t be bothered to make an effort to entertain myself, I watch YouTube videos. Like most folks, I have some weird things that I like (studio apartment tours, Van Life home tours, videos about Japanese food) and a slate of YouTube channels that I watch on a regular basis. I will also sometimes spend hours watching videos about a topic I’d like to learn about. Sometimes all this can be valuable time spent and can be relaxing, but recently I feel like I’m spending too much time watching recommended videos from my home page that I am not particularly engaged by or interested in.

I want to spend my time in treatment doing things that bring me joy and enrich my life. I don’t want to waste my free time vegging out with YouTube. From today on I am going to stop being so lazy and put more effort into having fun. Here’s a short list of things I’ll be doing instead of watching YouTube videos:

Re-watching my favourite anime series

When I’m working, I often feel a bit guilty about watching shows I’ve already seen, reading books I’ve already read or playing video games I’ve already played. I have a unique opportunity right now, however, to revisit some of my favourites. I think that this will be fun, relaxing and a great source of comfort.

Playing simple video games

Normally, I play a lot of console video games; however, since starting chemotherapy, I have had significant issues with neuropathy in my hands and fingers. This makes it difficult for me to play games on handheld consoles or using a controller. Fortunately, I can still play simple mouse and keyboard games, such as as visual novels and adventure games. I have a nice backlog of simple PC games already installed on my laptop that I hope to start playing soon.

Reading books

I often think that going to school for as long as I did ruined reading for me. After finishing my two degrees, I associated reading books with work and not with relaxation. I am ashamed to admit that I haven’t spent much time reading since 2008. Since I haven’t been able to play video games the way I could prior to my diagnosis, however, I have been reading constantly. My goal is to get through 2-3 books per month while I am in treatment.

Playing with my new puppy

We will be bringing home our new puppy from the breeder on February 19th. I am assuming that house and obedience training will be taking up a good chunk of my time from that day forward. I am so excited that I can hardly contain myself. I have a significant update to share on our puppy situation, but that can wait until we get her home and settled. Please look out for it.

There plenty of other ways that I can purposefully and joyfully spend my free time, but it is my hope that these will be my focus over the coming weeks. I will still watch YouTube from time to time, but I don’t want to let it swallow so many hours from now on. Do you sometimes feel like you aren’t spending enough of your free time doing things that actually bring you joy? Do you have any YouTube guilty pleasures that you can get lost in for hours? Let me know! I’d love to hear all about them!

This might be one of the oddest combinations for reviews I’ve come across in a long time: a collection of Oprah’s columns from her magazine and a hentai game. Oh well, we all know I like trying a little of everything!

Oprah Winfrey – What I Know for Sure

What I Know for Sure is a collection of Oprah’s columns of the same name, originally published in O magazine. Each essay is essentially a lesson about something that Oprah has learned for certain over the course of her life and I would say that the tone of the essays is generally inspirational. What I Know for Sure isn’t the type of book that I would normally reach for, but a YouTuber I follow mentioned that it had been a source of comfort and inspiration to her and, since I am in an excellent position to absorb things that are comforting and inspirational, I thought I would give it a try.

While I did enjoy most of this book, some of the anecdotes made me shake my head at Oprah’s overwhelming privilege. For example, one of the lessons in the Joy chapter was that one should always look after themselves as carefully as they look after others. This is a profound idea that can be a struggle for so many of us and the fact that she spends a great deal of time in this book discussing self-care in general is fantastic. In order to teach readers this particular lesson, however, Oprah employs a story about hiring a famous devotional singer to perform at her birthday party, something she wasn’t willing to do for herself alone and only thought of arranging once she learned that one of her close friends also liked the singer. Why, Oprah’s friends wondered, couldn’t she have hired the singer for her birthday alone? Why did she need to do it for someone else rather than doing it for herself? As I said, the sentiment here is good, but the story is a problem for the wealthy and I found myself rolling my eyes as I read it.

Overall, however, despite a few missteps, several of the chapters of the book were extremely powerful for me, particularly the chapters on Resilience, Gratitude and Connection. I agree with many of the principles that she discusses, such as the idea that no other person can make you happy if you aren’t happy with yourself, a topic that I spent some time talking about earlier this week. I also greatly admire Oprah’s commitment to life long learning and completely agree with her when she asks… “when you stop learning, you cease to grow and subconsciously tell the universe you’ve done it all — nothing new for you. So why are you here?”

If you’re into Oprah’s particular brand of radical self love and you like reading inspirational literature, I think that What I Know for Sure is a great book to have in your collection. I think that this book is best read when you need a short, easy to digest pick-me-up. If you’re having a bad day, read a column or two and you might find a little extra energy to get on with it.

HuniePop

In the video game community, HuniePop is more than a little notorious. It’s an OEL (original English language) soft hentai game where the player can date and/or sleep with potential anime girl mates by solving match-three puzzles. I would say that the match-three gameplay is a cross between Bejeweled/Candy Crush and You Must Build a Boat (YMBAB). The puzzle aspect of the game is well-designed and super fun to play. At any given time, you can hang out with one of the game’s available female characters (you can play as a male or female protagonist, but all of the dateable characters are female). You can ask them questions about themselves to earn currency, give them gifts to increase your reputation with them, or you can go out on dates.

The dates are where the match-three puzzles happen. In order to successfully complete a date, you must match adjacent tiles to earn a set number of points in a set number of moves. Each colour of tile has a characteristic associated with it and each character has a favourite characteristic, which will yield more points. If you are able to complete several dates with one character, she will eventually join you at your home and have sex with you which involves a bonus puzzle, some poorly voice-acted moaning and a topless illustration of the character.

All in all, I found HuniePop to be disappointing. I love romance in video games and the otome visual novel (a romantic choose-your-own-adventure genre aimed at women) is one of my favourite game genres. Unfortunately, HuniePop lacks the emotional depth that I like to see in romance games and the character interactions consist only of surface-level fan-service. The characters are poorly developed and the only information you learn about them is similar to what you might find in a profile of a popular boy band member in a teen magazine (height, weight, favourite colour, favourite hobby, etc…). None of the scenarios I encountered were even remotely romantic or revealed anything deeper about the characters involved. The game’s only surviving grace is its excellent match-three gameplay.

Lorde – Melodrama

Lorde’s sophomore album, Melodrama, is one of the best I’ve listened to in a long time. It’s a loose concept album about love, losing love, being heartbroken, being lonely, and moving on. Her ideas are expressed incredibly well through tracks that will make you want to move and dance, but is also completely devoid of any kitschy party anthems. It’s an incredible pop-but-not-quite-pop album, many of whose songs defy pop conventions. The subject matter of the album’s most prominent ballad, Liability, for example, is not just about a lost love. Instead, Lorde bemoans her painful loneliness and the fact that the people in her life are no longer interested in spending time with her.

When I first heard the album’s lead single, Greenlight, I instantly fell in love. I didn’t listen to the whole album at the time, but that song was on every playlist I made after its release in 2017. I was inspired to check out the album when I saw that it had been high on the top albums lists of many prestigious publications (Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, for example) and, in my opinion, Melodrama deserves all of the praise. I would recommend this album to pretty well anyone. Give it a try!

Style Savvy: Styling Star

I may revisit Style Savvy: Styling Star in a later review post once I have completed the main story, but I wanted to spend some time talking about it now because I’ve been playing it quite a bit over the past two weeks. For me, there’s no doubt that Styling Star is the second best game in the Style Savvy series. I don’t think that I could ever love a fashion game as much as I love Trendsetters, but Styling Star comes close.

I was not a fan of the changes that syn sophia made to the third game in the series, Fashion Forward, many of which incorporated elements of Nintendo’s popular Animal Crossing franchise. I have never been able to get into an Animal Crossing game, despite several attempts. As a person who typically works a full-time day job, I tend to dislike games that have real time clocks. Due to the restrictions of my work schedule, I often play games at the same time every day, which means that there are many events and features in those games that are easy for me to miss. Of course, I can always mess with my 3DS system clock, but in my opinion, forcing users to modify their systems to see what your game has to offer is poor design.

Styling Star retains a lot of the better additions to Fashion Forward (you can work in the hair salon, do makeup and design your own clothes) while returning to the addictive day/night cycle format of Trendsetters. For me, this format makes it tough to put the game down — I’m always wanting to get to the next day to see what my accomplishments from the previous day will unlock. They have also added a lot of new outfits and clothing items to the game, which I am very happy about, since I felt like the additions to the previous game were minimal at best.

Overall, I’m excited to keep playing Styling Star. The main story seems like it’s going to be an interesting departure from previous games in the series, and I think that my character will have a significantly different role to play in how that unfolds. Stay tuned for more on this game from me.

As a young woman in my late teens and early 20s, my feminism had three main tenets: I was rabidly pro-choice; I was interested in LGBTQ rights; I didn’t want to be a housewife like my mother. The third idea culminated in a sort of “bad bitch” attitude of privileged, second-wave feminism that, in my opinion, was damaging to me and my progress as a person. I completely rejected the nurturing side of myself: I refused to do housework, I refused to learn how to cook. I could get a partner who could do those things for me — I was a career woman and would never be trapped into servitude like my mother. I was way too smart for that shit.

Quick side bar: my mother actually worked from home for most of my youth and only stopped when her parents needed care. When my father left my mother in 2002, she had seen the writing on the wall, gone back to school, and was able to get a decent job as an admin in a mental health centre. I’m not sure why I was so attached to the idea of my mother as a full-time housewife, but I think I probably just wanted to be a career-focused person and I didn’t want to get stuck in a shitty relationship for as long as my mother was.

I was also not ready to make any effort to understand true inequality (I’m not even sure I would have been capable of it at the time). I wanted everyone to have equal rights, but I also felt as though many of the more difficult battles had already been fought and won. I was naive enough to believe that we were living in a post-racist and post-sexist society where the only rights that really needed defending were LGBTQ and abortion rights. In some ways, this is not particularly surprising. I’m white, I grew up in an affluent household, I was a spoiled only child and I was never told that I couldn’t do things because I was a woman. The only real adversity I had ever had to face was some family drama and my emotionally abusive father.

My “bad bitch” attitude softened a bit over the next few years. My parents split up and my life got a bit crazy. I was working two part-time jobs, going to university part time and helping to look after my father’s father. I had a boyfriend and I tried to have a social life. This didn’t leave me with any space for politics: lot of aspects of my life were serious and important and I wanted to have fun in my spare time. This was when I started to become more closely involved in fandom.

When I say fandom, I’m nearly always referring to the female-dominated sector of fandom, where most fanfiction comes from. What many male members of the video game community probably don’t realize is that discussions about diversity, equality and representation in fictional media started popping up in female-dominated fandom communities years prior to the emergence of figures like Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn, who would push these issues to the forefront of video games.

My response to those discussions was always politely dismissive: I wasn’t interested in political discussion getting in the way of my fun. Fandom was my escape from the heaviness of my everyday life and, at that time, I needed to keep things light. My reaction to those discussions and politics was quite similar to the video game community’s reaction to Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women Kickstarter campaign: I wanted them to stay far away from me. The big difference being that I just avoided those discussions rather than going to online forums and uttering death and rape threats.

I’m not a huge fan of Anita Sarkeesian, but I credit her with being the lightning rod that inspired the development of my true feminism. When the controversy over her Kickstarter campaign began, I was horrified by the kinds of behaviour and comments I witnessed in communities where I had previously felt welcome. For example, I had been an active member of the Giant Bomb community since the site had started and the forums had always been a place where I felt comfortable hanging out. The reaction to the Tropes vs. Women Kickstarter campaign, however, made me feel completely unsafe.

Thousands upon thousands of men in the video game community flocked to Anita Sarkeesian’s website and social media accounts and threatened her with death and rape. They subsequently flocked to popular video game forums to talk about what a bitch she was, how ugly she was, how stupid she was, and how she had no right to voice her opinion about video games. Some even attempted to dox her and prove that her family was affluent so that they could approach Kickstarter and report her campaign as a scam (there was a huge thread on Giant Bomb that was devoted to this that was, thankfully, deleted).

If all this was done in response to a series of YouTube videos that probably wouldn’t even be widely viewed, what would these men say to me if I disagreed with them? What would happen to me if I agreed with her arguments? What if I questioned the representation of women in video games from my own perspective? Would they speak to me this way? Would they threaten and bully me? Of course they would. They had given me no evidence to the contrary.

It was this horrible reaction to Anita Sarkeesian that made me realize that we were not living in a post-sexist society. From there I started actively trying to gain a better understanding of inequality. I read books by marginalized authors and I read feminist literature and contemporary memoirs. My mother needed my help and I became her full-time caregiver for a year. I taught myself how to cook and how to bake (turns out I’m pretty damned good at both). I volunteered at a women’s shelter. I finally started to embrace the nurturing part of myself and I allowed myself to see that there were people in the world that I needed to fight for.

In many ways my accepting myself as a nurturer was akin to accepting my femininity, something that I had never been able to do. While this was a stepping stone in my feminist development, I have actually arrived at a place beyond that. While activities like cooking can be caring and nurturing, it is incorrect to assume that caring and nurturing are inherently feminine. Radical feminist author bell hooks (yes, her name is all lowercase) has written extensively about the fact that loving and nurturing should be natural to both men and women and it is our gendered view of society that limits those traits to women. If we think about cooking from this perspective, cooking isn’t a feminine activity that comes naturally to women because they are caregivers. Cooking is a life skill that we should all learn in order to care for ourselves and the people we love, regardless of gender.

Men and women are different, but I believe that removing gendered preconceptions from my life makes it a lot simpler and prevents me from limiting my options. Within myself, I have the capacity to accomplish a great deal, especially if I can move past society’s, and my own, preconceptions of what I should be. As I write this, I am 36 years old — soon to be 37. I discovered my true feminism a little later than some and it has been a long and arduous process. I know that I will still make mistakes from time to time and that my views will continue to evolve, but I am proud of how far I’ve come.

I finally invested in a decent lap desk, which has made playing PC games on my laptop much more comfortable. As such, I’ve been on a bit of a tear playing shorter indie games on Steam. Many of my media round-up posts in the coming weeks/months will include reviews of games similar to the ones below.

One Night Stand

One Night Stand is an excellent experimental indie visual novel that is a refreshing and intimate take on the genre. Instead of engaging in various courtship rituals and trying to impress or please a potential mate, One Night Stand is about navigating your way through an awkward situation. You’ve woken up in an unknown woman’s bed with a raging hangover and no idea how you got there. Once the woman wakes up, you are able to interact with items in her room (the number of things you can look at is limited) and converse with her. Different combinations of items and dialogue options will determine how the game unfolds. There are 12 endings in total, many of them offering substantially different dialogue other than a few set conversations (which are easy to fast forward through).

I heartily enjoyed One Night Stand. I have a soft spot for atypical visual novels (Digital: a Love Story is one of my favourite games of all time) and, while I did experience some hitching and performance issues, the game’s art is gorgeous and unique. The game’s subject matter and its art style combine to create an experience that feels intimate and personal in a way that I think demonstrates what a great medium video games is to present this type of story. I recommend One Night Stand to anyone who likes experimental visual novels or short, story-focused experiences.

Reigns

Reigns is a game with a great concept that doesn’t quite hit the mark. The game is essentially a Tinder visual novel. You play as a king who is trying to rule a kingdom and survive as long as possible. Various characters from your court will approach you with conundrums, most of which you can respond to with a simple yes or no (swiping right or left). Typically, your decisions will impact one or more of your four resources (the church, the people, the army and the treasury). You must balance out your resources, because if any one is completely depleted you will die and have to start over as the next king.

This sounds great to me as a concept, but in practice I just didn’t find the game to be particularly fun. I found that sometimes my character would die quite arbitrarily or the decisions presented to me would make it nearly impossible to balance my resources sufficiently to keep moving forward. Some characters and scenarios can send you on interesting little side paths, but I felt like I wasn’t finding those paths very often — even though I was still early in the game I found that I was getting a lot of repetition. I also wasn’t particularly impressed by the game’s writing, which made the repetition particularly irksome. All and all, for me this game was a bit of a disappointment, but I am glad that I tried it out because the idea itself is so interesting.

This is my first Media Round-up. Since I will be reading, watching, playing, and listening to a lot of media during my medical leave, I wanted to spend some time writing about all of it. I often find reviews to be challenging to write, particularly music reviews (finding a vocabulary to express how you feel about music is very difficult), so I thought that this would be a good exercise for me. I may change the format of these posts in the future, but for now I’m going for one post like this per week.

TV on the Radio – Seeds

I’ve been a TV on the Radio fan since 2006, when a blogger I followed at the time included Return to Cookie Mountain in his list of top albums for that year. I checked it out and fell in love. 2008’s Dear Science continues to be one of my favourite albums of all time and I think that Nine Types of Light has some some sublimely beautiful moments that surpass any of the band’s other albums. Unfortunately, I don’t think that Seeds quite measures up to their previous efforts. When it was first released in 2014, I was overwhelmed with gratitude that the band had decided to put out a new album at all, given the death of Gerard Smith (bass, keyboards). At the time, however, I wasn’t that interested in listening to any challenging new music and set it aside until I was ready to give it the attention it deserved.

While I enjoyed Seeds, I wouldn’t say that it was worth a three and a half year wait. The pacing of most TV on the Radio albums is always mixed, but Dear Science and Nine Types of Light felt like they had strong unifying themes (art funk and art funk slow jams respectively). Seeds, however, jumps around a little too much for my taste. The tracks feel more like a group of random songs than they do like a cohesive artistic statement — an aspect of the band’s work that I have always admired. I would recommend Seeds to die-hard fans, but I would never suggest it for anyone that had never tried listening to TV on the Radio previously. Return to Cookie Mountain, Dear Science, and Nine Types of Light are three of my favourite albums of all time and I would recommend them to just about anyone. They’re not always easy to listen to and can be a bit challenging, but they’re worth it. Lyrical quality above and beyond any other bands actively producing music right now.

Key tracks: “Quartz“, “Careful You“, “Love Strained“, “Right Now”

You Must Build a Boat

When it was released n 2015, You Must Build a Boat made a lot of Game of the Year lists. I took note of it because I’m a sucker for match three games with RPG mechanics (I spent at least 100 hours playing the original Puzzle Quest when it was first released on Xbox 360). You Must Build a Boat (or YMBAB) is an interesting combination of different gameplay genres, combining elements of match three, runners, rogue-likes and RPGs into an addictive package. The aim of YMBAB is to increase the size of your boat by recruiting new crew members and monsters to accompany you on your journey. The player accomplishes this by running through dungeons and defeating enemies in battle by successfully completing match three puzzle mechanics. Along the way there are chests to open and traps that can freeze you and end your run. Each run, at least for me, is very short and, fortunately, you get to keep any rewards earned when you fail.

I find YMBAB to be a significant challenge. The match three mechanics are a little different than the Bejeweled standard of swapping adjacent tiles. Puzzle and Dragons taught me that I am terrible at match three mechanics that deviate from the format I’m used to and the same applies to YMBAB. While this can make the game a little frustrating for me, the knowledge that I am slowly working toward upgrades that will make the runs a little easier lessens that frustration quite a bit. The game’s music is also great and makes multiple runs a little less frustrating, but there could be a lot more variety — as far as I know there is only one piece of music in the whole game. If you like the track, you should be pretty happy, but if you’re not a fan, this could get a little annoying.

All in all, I would definitely recommend YMBAB to anyone who enjoys a good puzzle game. I haven’t tried the mobile version, but the PC version is great for playing in short bursts when you need a break from something or you’re in-between things. For me, however, I definitely prefer more traditional match three puzzlers like Puzzle Quest.

Maria Semple – Where’d you go, Bernadette?

This year I will be participating in an online book club run by some users of ONTD (Oh No They Didn’t), a long-running celebrity gossip community on Livejournal. Each month has a theme and participants can choose any book that fits and discuss their choices on ONTD or the community that they have created on Goodreads. The theme for January is any book that will be adapted into a movie or TV series in 2018.

I chose Where’d you go, Bernadette because Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Waking Life) is directing the film adaptation. Since he has yet to make a film that I don’t like, I felt that this book would be a good choice for me. I am now very curious about how the film will turn out because while I did enjoy the book and found it to be funny and well-written, I also felt that it was a bit vapid, which is something that you can’t say about any of Richard Linklater’s films.

Where’d you go, Bernadette is a story about the disappearance of Bernadette Fox, a wealthy architect turned housewife whose husband works for Microsoft. The manner in which the story is presented is very interesting. Most of the story is told chronologically in documents, such as emails, letters, faxes, articles, and reports. Some gaps are filled by Bernadette’s daughter, Bee, in first person perspective. As an archivist, I heartily enjoyed this format and felt like Semple did a great job of presenting the voices of different characters.

Many of the book’s characters, unfortunately, are impossibly unrealistic. Bee is probably the easiest to relate to and I can sympathize a bit with her being a normal-sized personality (while super charming and smart) growing up with parents that are a little off kilter. The other characters, however, are difficult to relate to. The examination of Bernadette’s mental illness and depression is interesting, but it’s difficult to empathize with her, because there are no real consequences to any of her issues or actions. This book isn’t intended to make any grand political statements, but I am at a point in my life where I don’t have much interest in the fluffy plights of super glamorous people with loads of money and their problems that they could easily pay money to work through.

My Media Round-ups will be posted every Sunday! Please look forward to them!